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Date
Time
5:00 pm
Venue
Paul Webley Wing (PWW), Senate House, SOAS
Room
Wolfson Lecture Theatre (SWLT)
Event type
Seminar

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A study of transoceanic musical appropriation and Swahili ethnic subjectivity on the Kenyan coast.

Sounds of Other Shores takes an ethnographic ear to the history of transoceanic stylistic appropriation in the Swahili taarab music of the Kenyan coast. Swahili taarab, a form of sung poetry that emerged as East Africa’s first mass-mediated popular music in the 1930s, is a famously cosmopolitan form, rich in audible influences from across the Indian Ocean. But the variants of the genre that emerged in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa during the twentieth century feature particularly dramatic, even flamboyant, appropriations of Indian and Arab sonic gestures and styles.

Combining oral history, interpretive ethnography, and musical analysis, Sounds of Other Shores explores how Swahili-speaking Muslims in twentieth-century Mombasa derived pleasure and meaning from acts of transoceanic musical appropriation, arguing that these acts served as ways of reflecting on and mediating the complexities and contradictions associated with being “Swahili” in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. 

The result is a musical anthropology of Kenyan Swahili subjectivity that reframes longstanding questions about Swahili identity while contributing to broader discussions about identity and citizenship in Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

Programme information

TimeProgrammeSpeaker
5:00pm - 5:05pmOpen remarksIda Hadjivayanis, Chair, Centre of African Studies 
5:05pm - 5:20pmOverview of the projectProf Andrew Eisenberg 
5:20pm - 6:00pmPanel discussion on the project
  • Prof Angela Impey 
  • Dr Ilana Webster-Kogen 
  • Dr Ida Hadjivayanis 
  • Prof Andrew Eisenberg
5:55pm – 6:20pmQ&A and discussion Audience
6:30pm - 7:00pmReception 

Photo by Keegan Checks on Unsplash

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Andrew Eisenberg is Associate Professor of Music at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Global Network Associate Professor of Music at NYU New York. He is the author of Sounds of Other Shores: The Musical Poetics of Identity on Kenya's Swahili Coast (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), an ethnographic and historical study of musical style and ethnic subjectivity on Kenya’s Swahili coast. 

The book explores how Swahili musicians and audiences in twentieth-century Mombasa worked creatively with Arab and Indian sounds to reflect upon and mediate their complicated and precarious social positioning in the Kenyan colony and post colony.

Prof Angela Impey is Emerita Professor of Ethnomusicology at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Song Walking. Women, music, and environmental justice in an African Borderland (University of Chicago Press 2018) which received American Musicology Society (AMS) Publication Subvention Award (2018), The Society for Ethnomusicology Marcia Herndon Prize (2019). Her current research focuses on ethno-ornithology, climate change and the sound worlds of the Africa-Eurasia flyways. 

Prof Ilana Webster-Kogen is an ethnomusicologist by training, specializing in music, diaspora and ethnicity in the urban Middle East. Her current work explores a triangular circulation network for Moroccan Torah scrolls between north Africa, France and Israel. She considers the migration and trade routes of the scrolls and the people who use them, and she examines biblical cantillation and its attendant gendered and ethnicized performance practices. 

Dr Ida Hadjivayanis is Senior lecturer in Swahili studies at SOAS University of London. She has translated a number of literary pieces including Peponi, the only work of the Nobel Laureate, Abdulrazak Gurnah in an African language, Swahili. She is currently working on the life history of a Swahili woman, Salama binti Rubeya who lived in Zanzibar and Kilwa between 1910 and 1960. 

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This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

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